If it's 'junk mail', isn't a giant skip the best place for it?

By Griff Rhys Jones

12:01AM GMT 27 Nov 2005

I have always suspected that most of my post could be thrown away unopened. But the directors of Mail Logistics were more enterprising than that. They hired a skip (something I'm not sure that I could do and I am the director of two companies) and they threw away several tons of mail; undelivered, as it were.

Dreadful, but I have to admit to mixed feelings about the plight of the 8,000 free magazines. I find myself wondering whether they may soon be prosecuting Tesco in Ipswich, too. The great Empire of Beans has stuck a rubbish bin right next to its magazine rack. This is to enable customers to get rid of their plastic-wrapped free catalogues and junk inserts before they have even paid for and own the magazines. Surely the biggest supermarket chain in the country doesn't believe that nobody really wants these marvellous advertisements?

Meanwhile, the jungle quakes. The birds fly up. Simons Cowell and Fuller are preparing to chomp each other to death over who first thought up Pop Factor or X-Idol. Well, as a matter of fact I did. Scratching my stomach on a sun-lounger in the Caribbean I remember thinking "a talent show for dire would-be pop singers would be a no-brainer, eh?" Between two stuffed olives I also thought up "The Biggest Bottom Competition", "Two Cats Fighting in a Bag", "Take My Daughter for a Week" and "Who Wants to be the Leader of the Conservative Party?"

Alas, I became befuddled by so much creativity and waddled off to eat something with a pineapple on it. I am sure I wrote these priceless formats down on the back of a beer mat. If I can only find it I could launch my own £100 million action.

The boy wonder of English Heritage, Simon Thurley, invited me to a clandestine meeting at the Wellington Arch on Tuesday, and I had another satisfying taxi-driver-address-moment. "Number One London sir, yes. I think you'll find the original arch was designed as the entrance to the Buckingham Estate, you know, but the Duke wasn't keen…"

I recognised a challenge. "Er… they definitely moved Marble Arch." I said, deftly switching to an arch I knew something about.

"Ah, that was Tyburn Gate of course."

We swapped hanging stories until we reached the middle of London's roundabout of war memorials. I had imagined some dusty unused iron steps to a cavernous centre. I walked straight into a shop. The arch is an attraction. You can visit yourself. You will have to cross to it without being mown down by an agitated policeman out on a call of course.

Stephen Fry was one the supper guests helping to judge a semi-final of MasterChef. Coincidentally, I have been in constant email contact all week with Rory McGrath (trying to establish which of us comes over the worst in Three Men in a Boat). I hear Rory has been demonstrating his own retentive powers on Stephen's comedy quiz QI.

This comes as no surprise to those who really know the great intellect, but seems to have alarmed those who think they know him from watching him "feel a sportswoman" on They Wish It Was All Over. Apparently he answered all Stephen's questions on QI with such frightening aplomb that the BBC was besieged by callers convinced he was cheating.

I must not bang on about television any more. Dutiful intellects like AA Gill have to subject themselves to Tee Vee in order to pay alimony or something. It would be churlish to render their witterings even more redundant by trespassing on their patch. But I was excited to realise that I was at one with the human race this morning. The BBC has had dozens of complaints about their pimply promotion for digital television featuring thousands of disembodied heads.

One, from a psychiatrist, warns that "the trail" may yet be responsible for psycho murders among the binge drinking classes. Luckily I am not a critic. But I should record that my family reacted as follows. "Oh no. That's horrible. Turn it off. It's so disgusting, how could anybody watch it? Ahrgh. Oh. Bleh. Etc."

What exactly is a "sustainable drain"? I ask because I met up with Simon Thurley again in the middle of the week when I hosted a question time for "The Thames Gateway Regeneration Project". I arrived at Docklands' Excel conference centre by public transport, with seconds to spare, and introduced Sir Stuart Lipton as Sir Upton Tupton and then forgot to ask the audience for any of their questions until the event was almost over.

Having played the Circus Tavern Purfleet at the extremity of the A13, I was worried that we might swamp the "character" of the grisly hinterland with too much regeneration but everybody else seemed keen to bring it on. Sir Bufton Tufton spoke wisely in favour of quality. So did Simon Thurley. Billy Bragg, a Barking boy, was concerned about the locals. Everybody else was too. It proved very difficult to get a disagreement going, so I gave up and congratulated all concerned.

Hardly has the decline of physics-teaching in the country been announced than dozens of hard-working journalists step forward to show that they were paying attention at the back of the class after all, and know an awful lot about nuclear fission and its frightening side effects. It seems wasteful that so much scientific expertise is writing for the newspapers instead of busy in laboratories inventing disposable geiger counters.